What a website actually costs, and what you are paying for
A small-business website in the Chicago area runs from about $200 for a simple built-once site to $15,000 or more for a custom build with integrations. Most local service businesses land between $2,000 and $6,000, or between $150 and $400 a month on a plan. The spread is that wide because the word website covers four different products, and almost nobody selling one tells you which they are selling.
Every quote you get will be a different number, and the range will be wide enough that you assume somebody is trying it on. Usually nobody is. The word “website” covers at least four different products, and a quote for one of them is not comparable to a quote for another.
Here is what the numbers actually are, what moves them, and the costs that tend to arrive after you have signed.
The range, in plain numbers
These are the bands a small business in the Chicago area will encounter. They are not universal and they move, but the shape holds.
| What you are buying | Typical range | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0–$400 a year | Wix, Squarespace or similar. You do the work, you rent the platform. |
| Built-once site | $200–$2,000 | A small site built for you, handed over, then largely left alone. |
| Custom small-business site | $2,000–$8,000 | Designed for your business, built properly, usually five to fifteen pages. |
| Custom with integrations | $8,000–$25,000+ | Booking, payments, membership, stock, or anything that talks to another system. |
| Monthly plan | $150–$1,500 a month | The site plus ongoing work. Costs less up front and more over three years. |
Most local service businesses — trades, clinics, salons, restaurants, consultants — need the third row. A fair quote for that in this market is somewhere between $2,000 and $6,000, and anything wildly outside that range deserves a question rather than a rejection.
Why the same brief gets a $900 quote and a $9,000 quote
Four things move the number, and only one of them is design.
How many pages, and how different they are. Ten pages that share one layout cost a fraction of five pages that each need their own. When somebody asks how many pages you need, they are not being lazy — it is the single biggest driver.
Whether the content exists. If you have copy, photographs and a logo, the build is a build. If somebody has to write your services page and photograph your premises, that is a separate job with its own cost, and it is the one most often left out of a cheap quote and added later.
Whether anything has to talk to anything else. A contact form is trivial. Online booking that respects your actual availability, or payments that reconcile with your accounting, is a different order of work. Integrations are where budgets genuinely break.
Who is doing it. A student, a freelancer, a small studio and an agency have genuinely different cost structures, and each is the right answer for a different business. The difference in price is mostly a difference in what happens six months later.
The four costs quotes leave out
The build price is rarely the whole price. These are the ones that appear afterwards.
Hosting and the domain. Somewhere between $50 and $500 a year depending on what you are on. Not large, but it is annual and forever, and it is the bill that gets forgotten until the site goes down.
Maintenance. Software gets security updates. A site nobody patches is a site that eventually gets defaced or breaks on an update. Budget for it or buy a plan that includes it, but do not assume a built-once site stays fine untouched.
Changes. Every business needs the hours changed, a service added, a price updated. Ask what a small change costs and how quickly it happens before you sign, not after. “We’ll sort it out” is not an answer.
Email. Professional email on your own domain is usually a few dollars per person per month and is almost never in the website quote, despite being the thing people notice first when it stops working.
What “cheap” usually means
A very low price is not automatically a bad deal. It usually means one of four things, and it is worth knowing which.
It might be a template with your logo dropped in, which is fine if that is what you want and dishonest if it was sold as custom. It might be somebody early in their career building a portfolio, which can be genuinely good value if you accept the risk that they move on. It might be a loss-leader for a monthly contract, where the real price is the three years after. Or it might be offshored to somebody you will never speak to, with the local seller taking a margin for account management.
The one to actually avoid is the fourth combined with hosting in their name, because that is the arrangement that turns into an outage nobody can fix. We have written separately about who built your website and whether you can still reach them, because it is the failure we get called about most.
What “expensive” should buy
Above about $8,000 you should be getting things a cheaper build does not include, and you should be able to name them. Original design rather than a template. Copy written by somebody who interviewed you. Real performance work, measured rather than asserted. Accessibility that has been tested rather than claimed. A build somebody else could pick up, because it uses ordinary tools rather than one person’s private setup.
If a quote is high and none of that is in it, the price is not buying you anything. Ask what specifically costs that much. A good answer is specific.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Ask both of these questions and the comparison usually resolves itself.
Who owns what at the end? The domain should be registered in your name, the hosting account should be yours, and the files should be handed over if you leave. Any answer that hedges on this is the answer. This matters more than the price.
What happens in month seven? Who fixes it when it breaks, what a change costs, how fast it happens, and what you are paying monthly for. A cheap build with no answer here is more expensive than a dearer one with a clear answer, and the gap shows up in the second year.
What we charge, since it would be strange not to say
Our entry build is $249 to make and $399 a year to keep running, hosted, patched, monitored and backed up, with the domain in your name and everything handed over if you leave. That is deliberately at the bottom of the range above and it is a five-page site, not a custom build — we are clear about which product it is. The monthly plans, which add marketing work rather than more website, start at $149.
The pricing page has the full breakdown, and the web design service page covers what is actually included in a build. If your business needs the $8,000 version, we will tell you that on the call rather than sell you the $249 one and hope.
The short version
Between $2,000 and $6,000 is a fair price for a proper small-business site in this market, less if you genuinely need less, more if something has to integrate. The build price is not the whole price, so ask about hosting, maintenance, changes and email before you compare quotes. And ask who owns the domain, because that one answer tells you more about the next three years than the number at the bottom does.